Slick digital in Wendy White’s new work

Checking out galleries this weekend, I was surprised to see that Wendy White, who has a solo at Leo Koenig this month, is incorporating digital images in her new work. Best known for large, handmade spray-painted constructions that combine stylized text and (sometimes) athletic equipment, White’s new work features fabricated panels printed with digital images that she has manipulated in Photoshop. In a conversation with Arthur Peña at Curbs and Stoops, White said working with fabricated panels was difficult at first because making the supports by hand was an important part of her process.

With the Fotobilds, I knew that I wanted to integrate photography, and
it made sense to use a real sign manufacturer since the subject matter
is image and architecture. I took all the photos and manipulated them in
Photoshop. They’re digitally printed but the frames themselves are
welded and roped by hand, so the end result is still very personal, even
if it is more of a collaboration…. [P]ainting as a singular discipline isn’t my thing. I think of the
Fotobilds as the logical next step toward a hybrid experience: painting +
sculpture smashed together with buildings and streets, how it feels
walking around a massive city, urban ghosts, forgotten architecture, new
signs. Basically there needed to be another surface, one that I
couldn’t make with painting materials, something more rooted in the
urban/universal…

There is something infinitely profound to me about walking down a street
that millions walk every day, and have walked every day for hundreds of
years, then opening a door (maybe a shitty graffiti covered door, maybe
a new door with handprints on the glass, either way everything
everywhere in NYC has marks on it) to go into a private residence, or a
restaurant – something about street level started to seem utterly
important to me. We physically interact with the city’s surfaces –
exteriors of buildings, bridges – primarily on street level. Everything
above is so clean and intact, but only because we can’t reach it to fuck
it up.

But…the new work is undeniably clean and intact–handsome, even. The digitally ghosted images, glossy surfaces, and professionally-fabricated supports seem too slick to wrestle with the urban history and emotional resonance that White says inform the series. Perhaps working with expensive fabricated materials creates a fear factor–White’s signature WTF attack strategy seems to have gone missing. Don’t skip her less nostalgic, more abstract pieces installed in the back room.

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Two Coats of Paint is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution - Noncommercial - No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Contact Sharon Butler via email for permission to use content beyond the scope of this license.